A massed production method for solid state tantalum capacitors is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,357,399 (inventor Ian Salisbury). This method involves providing a substrate wafer of solid tantalum, forming a sintered, highly porous, layer of tantalum on the substrate, sawing the layer of porous tantalum with an orthogonal pattern of channels to produce an array of upstanding porous tantalum rectilinear bodies, anodising the cubes to produce a dielectric layer on the bodies, dipping the bodies in manganese nitrate solution and heating to convert the applied solution to manganese dioxide thereby to form a cathode layer, applying respective conducting layers of carbon and then silver onto top ends of each body, bonding a lid consisting of a wafer of solid metal onto the silver layer; injecting insulating resin material into the channels between bodies constrained by the substrate and lid; and slicing the assembly in a direction perpendicular to the plane of the waters and along the centre lime of each channel thereby to produce a plurality of capacitors in which the anode terminal consists of substrate material, the cathode terminal consists of lid material and the capacitive body consists of the coated porous tantalum body.
This method allows the production of highly compact, reliable capacitors of high volumetric efficiency. However with the continued miniaturization of components demanded by the electronics industry there is pressure to produce ever smaller and more efficient capacitors.